Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Two years ago, in a comment at LanguageHat, AJP Crown
wondered whether there was interest in writing about truffles here.
Honestly, the challenge has not been material, but having time to put
it into some kind of coherent form.

These days, restaurants and frozen entrees offer dishes like mac-n-cheese that are truffled, that is, made with truffle oil. The LA food critic Jonathan Goldcalled truffle oil, “the ketchup of the middle class” and a judge on a recent Chopped proposed that it should be incinerated. In 2003, Jeffrey Steingarten wrote a piece for Vogue
provocatively titled, “Does truffle oil have anything to do with
truffles at all?” (I won't try to link to it online. A individual
subscription to Vogue's online archive cost $1575 per year, so
I doubt anyone who reads this blog has one. The public library where I
read it still has all the print issues neatly shelved in cardboard
boxes.) He methodically samples various truffle-derived or -named
products. The best he can be say is that some are worse than others.
Mostly, truffle oil is vegetable oil with 2,4 dithiapentane (or, if you prefer, bis(methylthio)methane) added. And since natural or naturale is not a controlled designation, saying that does not mean anything about how the oil was made.

Some classic European truffle dishes, meant to showcase Périgord black and Piedmont white truffles, are vegetarian. Such as an omelette aux truffes or fresh pasta al tartufo. Rossini's Salad from The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook
is vegan: boiled potatoes, sliced truffles cooked in champagne, oil and
vinegar dressing. (Dumas (fils)'s “better version of it,” Salade Francillon, is not. Toklas notes that, “Rossini was inordinately fond of truffles.” Indeed, he once claimed,
«Je n'ai pleuré que trois fois en ma vie; la première, quand mon
premier opéra tomba, à la première representation; la seconde, lorsque
me trouvant en bateau, avec des amis, une dinde aux truffes, que nous
devions manger, vint à tomber dans l'eau; et la troisième, lorsque
j'entendis Paganini pour la première fois.» 'I have only cried three
times in my life: first, when my first opera bombed on opening night;
second, when finding myself in a boat with friends, a truffled turkey
that we intended to eat fell into the water; and third when I heard
Paganini for the first time.') Unfortunately, it seems that by the time
truffles have been flown over from Europe and driven up from New York
here to Boston, chefs feel obligated to only use them extravagantly as
a garnish on some meat dish. Which is likewise how they always seem to
show up on Iron Chef.

To relate the history
of truffles would be to undertake that of world civilization, in which,
though they are silent, they have had a greater part than the laws of
Minos or the tablets of Solon, through all the great epochs of the
nations, through all the great lights which shone on empires; they
flowed into Rome, from Greece and from Libya; the barbarians coming
upon them trampled them underfoot and made them disappear, from
Augustulus to Louis XV they fade out only to reappear in the 18th
Century and to attain their peak under the parliamentary government
from 1820 to 1848.

This is a hard case to make.
There is a much more solid one for spices, which really did drive the
history of the world. Or, at least for the Americas and Europe, for
potatoes, as in Salaman's classic History and Social Influence of the Potato. Truffles in fact made a brief appearance here before in a post on Potato. And when the Spanish discovered potatoes, they compared them to turmas 'truffles'. The German Kartoffel retains the association.

A
good part of the history of truffles is the history of working out
where they come from and whether it is possible to control that.

As
we have here made a beginning of treating of the marvels of Nature, we
shall proceed to examine them in detail; and among them the very
greatest of all, beyond a doubt, is the fact that any plant should
spring up and grow without a root. Such, for instance, is the vegetable
production known as the truffle; surrounded on every side by earth, it
is connected with it by no fibres, not so much as a single thread even,
while the spot in which it grows, presents neither protuberance nor
cleft to the view. It is found, in fact, in no way adhering to the
earth, but enclosed within an outer coat; so much so, indeed, that
though we cannot exactly pronounce it to be composed of earth, we must
conclude that it is nothing else but a callous concretion of the earth.…
Whether the truffle grows gradually, or whether this blemish of the
earth—for it can be looked upon as nothing else—at once assumes the
globular form and magnitude which it presents when found; whether, too,
it is possessed of vitality or not, are all of them questions, which,
in my opinion, are not easy to be solved. It decays and rots in a
manner precisely similar to wood.It is known to me as a fact,
that the following circumstance happened to Lartius Licinius, a person
of prætorian rank, while minister of justice, a few years ago, at
Carthage in Spain; upon biting a truffle, he found a denarius inside,
which all but broke his fore teeth—an evident proof that the truffle is
nothing else but an agglomeration of elementary earth. At all events,
it is quite certain that the truffle belongs to those vegetable
productions which spring up spontaneously, and are incapable of being
reproduced from seed. (tr. Bostock & Riley)

The
following peculiarities we find mentioned with reference to the
truffle. When there have been showers in autumn, and frequent
thunder-storms, truffles are produced, thunder contributing more
particularly to their developement; they do not, however, last beyond a
year, and are considered the most delicate eating when gathered in
spring. In some places the formation of them is attributed to water; as
at Mytilene, for instance, where they are never to be found, it is
said, unless the rivers overflow, and bring down the seed from Tiara,
that being the name of a place at which they are produced in the
greatest abundance. … (ibid.)

That
the right amount of moisture is needed for growth is by itself not
surprising. And could charitably be described as a fact, and as such a
basis for some similar French folk sayings:

When it rains on Saint Roch (August 16), truffles are born on the rock.

When it rains on Saint Bartholomew (August 24), there is a nestfull of truffles.

But the thunderstorms and formation from bits of earth go beyond that. We will return to the matter of seeds below.

So too Plutarch: SymposiacaIV 2 is titled, “Διὰ τί τὰ ὕδνα δοχεῖ τῇ βροντῇ γίνεσθαι” 'Why truffles seem to be produced by thunder'. Ancient Greek had several words for kinds of truffles, including γεράνειον, μίσυ and ὕδνον. Theophrastus describes (Frag. 167) μίσυ as a truffle growing near Cyrene and it looks like a loanword. Manuscripts of his Enquiry into Plants have (I vi 5):

πλὴν εἰ ὅλως ἔνια μὴ ἔχει, καθάπερ ὕδνον μύκης πύξος κράνιον.

except that some have no roots at all, such as the truffle mushroom boxwood cherry.

The last two words are evidently corrupt. The usual conjectures (as in the Loeb linked above) are πέζις κεραύνιον, so 'bullfist thunder' because of that association. But this seems like a folk etymology. It could have been γεράνειον, which appears to derive from γέρανος, which normally means 'crane'. But the Etymologicum Magnumhas“γέρανος, ὁ ὄμβρος ὑπὸ κυρηναίων.” Again, Cyrene was where μίσυ came from. Now ὄμβρος is still usually 'thunderstorm'. But Hesychius says that ὄμβρος is χοιρίδιον, which is a diminutive of χοῖρος
'porker'. This makes sense, since pigs are good at finding truffles;
better than dogs, but harder to train not to just eat what they find.
Emboldened by this, Werner Winterproposed to derive ὕδνον from ὗς 'swine' as *su-Adnom. The latter part being something to do with eating, like Sanskrit अन्न anna 'food, esp. rice' < *ed-no-m, the root being the same as English eat. So, 'sow-eats'. In other words, it's possible that both Greek words are in the always surprising category, Words You Never Knew Had Something to Do with Pigs.

It is even proposed from time to time that the manna of the Israelites was truffles, for instance, here, as more sustaining than the usual proposals.

On a state visit in 1998, Madeleine Albright received “eleven huge boxes of Saudi-grown truffles” from Crown Prince Abdallah. In Madam Secretary,
she says that under State Department rules she was allowed to keep them
because they were perishable. I believe at the time some opposition
politicians tried to make trouble by valuing them as though they were
the better known (to Americans and Europeans) kinds. A Saudi Aramco Worldarticle
gives some more words in modern Arabic dialects and a recipe. As usual,
the print version has excellent photographs. However, the quote about
the their abundance under the Fatimid Caliphate may be not from Edward Lane, but Stanley Lane-Poole, unless the latter is in fact quoting some work of his great uncle's that isn't online.

Typical of the entries one finds by searching around in the elder Lane's Lexicon is one for فَسَوَاتُ الضِّبَاعِ fasawātu alḍḍibāʿi 'hyena farts', “an appellation of Certain truffles, … and further that it is a
plant of disagreeable odour, having a head which is cooked, and eaten
with milk; and when it dries, there comes forth from it what resemblesوَرْس.” (Which I think means they produce something like Indian yellow dye.)

Tuber and terræ tuber give many of the modern words for truffle in Western European languages: Italian tartufo, French truffe (earlier trufle), German Trüffel, Spanish trufa.
The origin is clear, though the exact phonological processes aren't;
and likewise it also somehow leads to obsolete and dialectical English trub. In the scheme of Wilkin's Philosophical Language, trubs are (p. 70; EEBO):

Plants > Herbs Considered According to their Leaves > Imperfect Herbs > Terrestrial > Moſt imperfect (which ſeem to be of a ſpontaneous generation) > Having no leaf > Without a Stem (of a roundiſh figure ‖ growing either in the ground, being eſculent, & counted a great delicate:

English also has the doublet trifle.

I
presume that Jarðkeppur 'earth fungus' is a deliberate native Icelandic
invention and relatively recent. A number of older words elsewhere
refer to various hypogeous foods, including truffles and other funguses
along with and potatoes and other tubers. As often with food words, it
is unclear, at least to me, whether these referred to a variety of
things within a single speech community or to different things in
related ones. For example, Spanish criadilla de tierra and turma de tierra. Grimm gives truffle as one of the meanings of Grübling, along with potatoes and Phallus impudicus (for which Dr. Krokowski can only bring himself to give half the name); Adelung says it is also a kind of apple. Zedler describes truffles in one of the entries for Erdäpfel. Among the synonyms there are Hirschbrunst 'hart rut' and Hirschschwamme 'hart fungus', the idea being that some kind of fungus is produced where stags had rutted. (In English, deer truffle is Elaphomyces, which deer eat.) A number of truffle web sites in Italy give Hirstbrunst; if not a typo, perhaps that is the form in a German dialect spoken in Northern Italy.

Mushrooms
like truffles are neither plants, nor roots, nor flowers, nor seeds,
but but nothing other than the superfluous moisture of earth, trees,
rotting wood, and other rotting things, which can be gathered from the
fact that all mushrooms and truffles, especially the ones which are for
eating, grow most frequently when there is thundery and rainy weather, …

The same passage is included almost verbatim in the 1671 edition of G. Bauhin's Pinaxp. 369 and translated into German in a 1590 MattioliKreutterbuch (p. 386):

In 1583, Giambattista della Porta published Phytognominica,
in which there is a chapter, “Contra antiquorum opinionem plantas omnes
ſemine donatas eſſe” 'Contrary to the opinion of the ancients, all
plants are provided with seed'. In noting that he has found seeds
(spores, that is) from mushrooms and truffles, he writes (p. 367):

Porphyrius therefore says falsely
that since they arise without seed mushrooms and truffles are the
children of the gods. So in truffles by shells, as in cypress by pills,
a black seed lies hidden: because of this they always come forth in
woods, where they have frequently been produced and rotted away.

Next,
that as Muſhroms may be generated without ſeed, ſo does it not appear
that they have any ſuch thing as ſeed in any part of them; for having
conſidered ſeveral kinds of them, I could never find any thing in them
that I could with any probability gheſs to be the ſeed of it, ſo that
it does not as yet appear (that I know of) that Muſhroms may be
generated from a ſeed, but they rather ſeem to depend merely upon a
convenient conſtitution of the matter out of which they are made, and a
concurrence of either natural or artificial heat.

Joseph Pierre de Tournefort sensed the contradiction between what he was able to observe,
“ne produit ni fleurs ni graines sensibles” 'produce neither flowers
nor perceptible seeds' and what he had to assume was going on, “Suivant
les apparences ces filets blancs ne font autre chose que les graines ou
les germes développés des Champignons” 'According to their appearance,
these white threads are nothing other than the seeds or developed germs
of mushrooms'.

The birth of the science of mycology was Pier Antonio Micheli's 1729 Nova plantarum genera juxta Tournafortii methodum disposita. He carried out experiments, some of which were successful, trying to grow fungi in culture media from spores. His illustration of truffles labels them semina.

Giovanni
Bernardo Vigo, “Il Virgilio Piemontese,” wrote a book-length poem on
truffles and truffle hunters originally in Latin and translated in 1776
into Italian by the author. It appears that the BNF has both versions bound together, but they have not scanned that into Gallica yet. There is a modern edition of just the Italian for only a few euros, though.

For balance, there is Eustache Deschamps, who when he got sick from eating truffles, wrote a ballade against them where each stanza ends with, “De pis avoir que d'acès de tierçaine” 'worse than having a bout of tertian fever'.

Most books on truffles in English mention that truffles grow in England, perhaps citing Tancred Robinson's 1693 report of them in Northamptonshire. Or Richard Bradley's Dictionarium Botanicum (1728) entry, “I gueſs, we have few old Woods in England without them.” Readers of A Common Reader may recall from the “Outlines” essay on Lady Dorothy Nevill
that, in addition to orchids, “she went into the question of funguses
and established the virtues of the neglected English truffle.” And
indeed that is reported
in the book by her son under review there — to the extent that Woolf''s
essay is a book review and not a meditation on upper- and
upper-middle-class, the aristocracy and the Walpoles, Darwins and
Stephens. And Lady Nevill's note-book records that she persuaded Lord Ashburton to hunt them beneath the beech trees and serve them for dinner at the Grange in Hampshire. But what were truffles traditionally called in Hampshire and Northamptonshire? Prior's On the Popular Names of British Plants (digested in Dickens's All the Year Round) only gives Parkinson's trubbes and the presumably general earth-balls.

There are also truffles in North America, in particular in Oregon and California. Early reports
noted that they were as good as European truffles, but suggested that
they were too rare to be exploited as food. And that has only happened
in the last few years, with the increased popularity of both truffles
and local foods. If these truffles were known to Native Americans, I
have not found any mention of it and so no description of what they
might have been called. On the other hand, on the East Coast, there is tuckahoe, Indian bread or the Virginia truffle. Jefferson noted this as Lycoperdon tuber, which is to say he thought it was a truffle. (Although it is not a truffle and truffles are no longer Lycoperdon.) The Algonquian etymology is sometimes given as something about bread. But in a Smithsonian report, the author quotes J. Hammond Trumbull — who gave Twain those Gilded Agemottoes — relating it to Cree pitikwaw 'made round', which seems to be the version given more often now.

There are some of our missionaries who are from the countryside in France where truffles are found, who assure us that the Pe fou ling of Chen si is indeed truffle.

There are true truffles in China, with names including 塊菌 (simplified 块菌) Mandarin kuai4 jun1, Cantonese faai3 kwan2, literally 'lump fungus'. See the Gastronomica article by Gareth Renowden, “Truffle Wars,”
on how these have gone from relative obscurity in Yunnan and Sichuan
out into the globalized food market since the 1980s and 90s. The same
species, Tuber indicum, is also native to India. A Colonel Elphinstone (I do not think this is any of the famous Elphinstones) reported them in the Kangra hills, growing under pine trees. And here is a note on something sold as “Tibetan truffles” in Munich's Viktualienmarkt last year and evidently either T. indicum or T. himalayensis.

Update: See comment below from JosephK giving more comprehensive Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese names. 松露菌 song1 lu4 jun1, literally 'pine dew fungus', appears to now be the more common name, particularly online. It originally referred to Rhizopogon rubescens and does confirm the pine tree habitat. The paper “块菌名实考证及其资源保护”
by Wang Yun 王云 and Liu Pei-Gui 刘培贵 covers Chinese species and names
more carefully and points out that attempts to exactly match Chinese Tuber species with type specimens have so far been inconclusive. There is also this documentary from CCTV-10, in which Prof. Liu is featured prominently.

Given the discussion above on Greek words, we should also mention the Buddha's last meal, sūkaramaddava,
which appears to literally mean 'pig delicacy', that is, tender pork,
or possibly something that pigs eat. Other traditional theories are
bamboo shoots trodden on by pigs or a mushroom (ahicchattaka 'snake's umbrella') that grows where pigs have trampled the ground. But Rhys-Davids, who had only noted the controversy in his Milinda, in his later translation of the Dīgha Nikāya, renders it as “a quantity of truffles,” following Neumann who had found various other sūkara- fungus words. See the thorough discussion in Arthur Waley's, “Did Buddha die of eating pork?” Waley, at least when with Beryl de Zoete, was a vegetarian.

Buffon
found himself at a dinner where truffled turkey was to be surved.
Before sitting down to the table, an elderly lady asked the naturalist
where truffles came from. “At your feet, Madame,” he answered. The lady
did not understand, so Buffon told her, “At the feet of charmes.”
She found both the compliment and the one who made it charming. Near
the end of the meal, someone put the same question to the savant, who,
not paying attention to the lady from before dinner, said ingenuously,
“At the feet of old charmes.” The lady, who heard him, did not find him so charming.

The oldest reference to this story I have found is in the 1804 L'improvisateur français, which also carefully lays out the pun: charmes is both 'charms', that is, attractive (female) physical attributes, and European hornbeams. A search also finds what appears to be an actual innocent occurrence. It shows up in English in a French language reader, translated in a Gentleman's Magazine piece on truffles and The Pleasures of the Table's chapter on them, as well as among “Anecdotes of the Kitchen” or “After Dinner Talk,” the latter from The Epicure: A Journal of Taste, from S.S. Pierce, the Boston Brahmins' grocer. I first read the joke in The Pantropheon. Alexis Soyer
was Britain's, and perhaps the world's, first celebrity chef in a more
or less modern sense, who also wrote a cookbook for people of modest
means, set up soup kitchens for victims of the Irish famine, and worked
with Florence Nightingale on the diet of men recovering in hospital
from the Crimean War.

Hornbeams, rather than hornbeans; that is, the trees whose wood is as hard as horn.This comment has allowed me to know that the English word beam and the French word bôme are likely cognates, together with boom, which like bôme comes from the Dutch word boom. Many languages use a word related to boom to talk of the rigid member at the foot of some sails, but apparently Dutch is not among them, as it uses the word giek, which was also borrowed in French as gui as an alternate name for the boom.

Truffe: this is the word used for the nose of a dog. The "truff(l)e" of a dog must be cold and humid when one touches it, or so goes the popular saying.

You give 块菌; Wikipedia treats the truffle at a main article on 松露 sōnglù 'pine dew' (to which 块菌 is a redirect).

The truffle seems to have a number of names in Chinese. The Baidu article on 松露 gives: 地菌 dìjūn 'ground mushroom', 块菰 kuàigū 'lump mushroom', 块菌 kuàijūn 'lump fungus', 猪拱菌 zhūgǒngjūn 'pig dig fungus' (i.e., dig up with snout), 拱菌 gǒngjūn 'dig fungus' (again, 'dig up with snout' is meant), and 无根藤果 wúgēn-téngguǒ 'rootless vine fruit'. The name 松露 sōnglù is said to be from Japanese because it grows 'combed by the pine wind and washed by morning dew' (栉松风、沐晨露). The sōnglù grows under pine and oak trees.

I have a good Chinese-Japanese dictionary that lists the following for 松露 (entry translated from the Japanese):

"Also 麦蕈 màixùn ['wheat/barley mushroom']. ショウロ shōro [see below]. A type of edible mushroom. It grows in April and May in pine forests near the seashore. It is round in shape and buried under the ground. It has a distinctive fragrance." Strangely, this usually extremely comprehensive dictionary does not list 块菌 at all, and the description of the fungus's habitat is oddly detailed.

Turning to Japanese, the truffle is officially known as 西洋松露 seiyō shōro 'Western pine dew'. The plain term 松露 shōro 'pine dew' refers to the not so closely related Rhizopogonaceae. However, the truffle is more commonly known by its French name トリュフ toryufu.

For the hell of it I looked up the Vietnamese for truffle and found (variously) nấm cục 'ball mushroom', nấm truyp 'truffe mushroom', and nấm củ 'tuber mushroom'. I even managed to find Mongolian: болцуу мөөг 'lump mushroom'!

I omitted to mention that Baidu Encyclopaedia has articles on the truffle not only at 松露 sōnglù, but also at 块菰 kuàigū, 麦蕈 màixùn, and 块菌 kuàijūn. Unlike Wikipedia, Baidu Encyclopaedia does not have a requirement that articles on the same topic should be found at a single article, with the result that multiple articles on the same topic can be found under different names (although with varying degrees of detail).

Recently there has been a trend in China to call truffles “Song-lu” in many publications and websites. However, the use of this name should be discouraged as it specifically refers to Rhizopogon rubescens and is not appropriate to use for true truffles.

I have no idea whether the names are dialect or otherwise. In my comment above I said that the name was from Japanese; in fact, the Japanese 西洋松露 is said to be from Chinese 松露 sōnglù, not the other way round. Chinese has a lot of regional and dialect names of varying degrees of earthiness. 松露 is at the sophisticated end of the spectrum. I suspect that 猪拱菌 is at the earthy end.

MMcM, that is very interesting! This mixup and imprecision among names is quite typical of China.

Your source seems to suggest that the current popularity of 松露 (and 麦蕈) could be due to reverse interference from Japanese (although even in Japanese the name 松露 strictly refers to Rhizopogon). This phenomenon -- interference coming back into Chinese from Japanese usage -- is also very common in modern Chinese.

i'm both fascinated and disappointed by your post. for some reason, i was directed by a post from the browser. the browser, based in uk, decided your post was worth reading. i read it and decided against posting my opinion of your post last nite. however, i couldn't control my usual good temperament, and wanted to write to you and others who just spent a few minutes of their life reading it.

i think you mean well as a polyglot, showing off your language skills. however, i feel it's like reading the story about the tower of babel. your treatment of the truffle is without context or historical understanding of this fungus. your quotes of famous writers only meant to show off what you know about latin and french, and whatever else.

when some random guy professes his knowledge of chinese and japanese in truffle, you quickly update his gibberish translations and quotations from poorly updated wiki entries from chinese websites. what for? as someone who doesn't know all the languages you profess to know, i do know chinese well. but it doesn't mean now that i'm an expert on the word origin of truffle. however, i also know you don't, since you wrongly described truffle as a plant. that i do know it's wrong. it's a fungus. No one who knows anything truffle would find that word choice is a poor one, esp. from a polyglot.

i suggest that if you truly want to explain to the world what a truffle is in different languages, first do your homework, not randomly quotes of famous people that you happen to a reason to quote. why use Pliny the Elder? ok perhaps he was the father of modern encyclopedia, etc. i get that. in fact, i like that b/c i like ancient classics and know a few things about history and science.

the last you want is to let the world know you just trusted some random stranger to tell you what each language on truffle is (esp. in languages you have no grasp in). and what is the point of telling the world what the chinese thinks of truffle? you have no idea why the chinese care or don't care about truffle. in fact, truffle is not eaten until recently as a gourmet food, but thanks to the western influences do people start caring about truffles. Even then the native truffle in china is not the same specie as the ones found in europe. there are other more famous fungi that the chinese use for traditional medicine...

I sincerely wish that there were time to expand on Chinese Tuber far beyond the sentence and a half that was in the original post. But as there is not, and as the Gastronomica piece given is from the point-of-view of Europe (and New Zealand), I have linked to the full text of 王 and 刘's 植物分类与资源学报 paper. And, for lighter fare, to the 关注松露 episode of CCTV-10's 走近科学.

If you, or anyone else, have specific resources that you care to share, it goes without saying that they would be most welcome.

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